The Happy Home

The pillars of the happy home: love, forbearance, cooperation, and fidelity.

Whoever says that family happiness is impossible for everyone, and that it is reserved to one set of husbands and children and denied to another, is mistaken. Mistaken too is he who proclaims that it is the child of passing circumstance, or a kind of luck that favors some and turns its back on the rest. This class of pessimists have had their sight sealed by ignorance and been overshadowed by despair; they have strayed from the straight path and lost their share of the pleasures of married happiness and its true delights.

There is a legend that says happiness visits every house at least once. If it finds circumstances there favorable, it stays; if it finds them adverse, it turns and flees... The wise man is he who seizes the opportunity and prepares to welcome it by providing the essential elements in creating the happy home.

The happy home, madam, rests above all on the pillars of love, forbearance, cooperation, and fidelity. By love I do not mean that reckless feeling which flares up suddenly and whose flame dies out in the twinkling of an eye; I mean rather that spiritual harmony, that blending of feeling, or that noble emotional sense which raises its possessor above the level of self, binding his life to the life of the one he loves and uniting their aim toward an end for which each member of the family delights to give much of himself, so that the other may attain it. Love is the magic eye that transforms what we see into what we desire; it smooths difficulties, lightens hardships, and helps the soul to bear pain for the sake of the happiness of those we love. Pure love is a calm feeling, born of close acquaintance before the bond of marriage, and strengthened by assurance of an abundance of moral qualities and of love; it raises the wife to something more than a mere woman, making of her a friend, a companion, and a faithful trustee over soul and mind, money and children.

Yet love, for all its abundance, may be a blinded thing, and shatter against the rough rock of life with its sharp edges and deep scars. So the happy home does not stand on love alone; it must be followed by a spirit of forbearance between the two spouses. And forbearance comes only through mutual good faith and trust, and an ample desire for calm and stability.

We may succeed greatly in our homes if we believe that we are human, and that human beings are liable to error. It is not strange that one of the spouses should stray from the right in word or deed; what is truly strange is that he should cling to his error, neither acknowledging it nor working to mend it. Strange too that the other's breast should grow tight with these errors, burying them within and building out of them, as the days pass, a volcano that soon erupts and destroys the calm and stability of the home.

Cooperation is a principal factor in preparing the happy home; without it the values of love and forbearance grow weak, for the judgments of mind and of material things have their effect in easing the family's task or complicating it. Cooperation's lofty mission is not fulfilled unless it is mutual, so that each of the spouses feels that he is not the sole head of his house, nor an absolute ruler over his family, but a partner, no more and no less; if he wishes to bring his interests safely to shore, he must give as much as he takes, and demand no more than he deserves.

Cooperation is both moral and material. The first appears in the readiness of the two spouses to solve whatever problems face the family, and in their concern to reach a satisfactory result whatever the price. Most misery arises from one spouse's failure to appreciate the other's troubles, or from his inclination to press his own rights at the expense of the rights of others. Responsibility toward the children, for example, is shared and mutual, and the man must carry his portion of it just as the woman carries hers, without shirking, without prejudice, without selfishness.

Material cooperation appears in working to regulate the family's economic structure. The man's task is to toil and labor, and then to place his earnings at the disposal of the family he has built, willingly and by his own choice. The woman's task is to reconcile her husband's earnings with the demands of her realm, confining expenses to what matches the income and doing without luxuries when the household's means do not allow them.

In any case, happiness will be our portion if we know that life is a great book in which each day's page stands by itself... We must open every morning a new, shining page, white in its desires and its aims, clean of the impurities of the pages before it. And nothing is finer than to train ourselves to shed our troubles as they come, so that we leave worries no way to cloud a new stage of our life; the least of the benefits to be mentioned is that we grant ourselves ever-renewed chances for happiness, contentment, and peace of mind.